The early twilight of the April night had fallen, when Adam Graeme left the dim lights of Fendie behind him, and travelled away into the darkness, shaping his course to the south. The faint indefinite sounds, and musical “tingling silentness” of the night, came close about him, like the touch of angels’ wings. The stars were shining here and there through the soft clouds of spring, and the dim shadowy sky blended its line yonder, in the distance, so gently with the darkened earth, that you could not mark the place of their meeting. The moon herself had been an intruder there; the subdued and pensive dimness which told of that nightly weeping of the heavens from which the young spring draws its freshness and its life, and the faint shining of yon solitary stars high in the veiled firmament, harmonized most meetly with the lonely spirit of the traveller, going forth to look upon the grave of his dead. The sad, wistful, yearning melancholy which belongs to this hour “between the night and the day,” who does not know--those faint hushed hopes, those inarticulate aspirations, turning then, when there is dimness on the earth, to the better something beyond--there are few who have not felt the influence of “the holy time.” A charmed sway it had borne at all times over the mind of Adam Graeme. And now it travelled with him like a human friend: in the stillness of his night journey there were gentle ministrations about him, influences of the earth and of the sky. CHAPTER IV. Touch the chords gently-- Those strings are heart-strings, and the sounds they utter-- Be silent when you hear them--are the groanings Of uttermost pain, the sighings of great sorrow, Voices from out the depths.--ANON. About twelve or thirteen years before the date of our last chapters, a young man from Glasgow, with his wife and one child, came as lodgers to a humble road-side cottage not far from the town of Fendie, and very near the Waterside. Walter Buchanan was an invalid. A delicate, sensitive man by nature, whose fine nervous organization was of that kind which is akin to weakness and not to strength--for there are both varieties--his health had been broken by the confinement and harassing labour of his vocation as a clerk in a mercantile office. His wife had a little portion, a very little one, which nevertheless to their inexperienced eyes seemed able to last long and accomplish much; so on the strength of it, and in obedience to the doctor’s peremptory order, that he should have rest and country air, Walter gave up his situation, and the young couple began to make the dangerous experiment of living upon their little capital. The gentle poetic man had been charmed in his early days, in some chance visit to the neighbourhood, by the stately water and pretty town of Fendie, and the pleasant remembrance decided their new habitation.